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Apples or oranges? What is JeOS?

Are you planning on juicing anytime soon? How about JeOSing? Confused yet? Here’s a hint: Both those sentences sound exactly the same when you say them aloud. What’s different about them is a case of apples and oranges however, and I’m not talking about Tropicana. I’m not even talking about pro sports figures and questionable performance enhancing tactics that may or or may not lead to asterisks being placed next to stats and failed Hall of Fame bids.

What I’m not going to talk about today is the Cream or the Clear; what I am going to talk about is virtualization, virtual appliances, and a little Linux distro called Ubuntu. As of this month they’re all being blended into a concoction the folks at Canonical Ltd. and VMware are affectionately calling JeOS.

Each of those topics are pretty well known now (virtual appliances still being a bit “new car smell,” but whatever), so how does JeOS bring something new to the table? Is it a product to be sold, or is it an architecture with which to build new exiting things that my colleagues and I will be writing about for years to come? One executive I’ve read recently who’s been at this a while has a rough idea.

By taking a short Internet boat ride over to rPath CEO Billy Marshall’s blog today, we find him addressing that very question.